Listen to your horse…: The pros and cons of Natural Horsemanship - Welcome

Listen to your horse…:

The pros and cons of Natural Horsemanship

I’m a big fan of natural horsemanship. It completely changed the way I approached and interacted with horses. Finally I had a way to understand and communicate with the horses, after years of working with them in the traditional sense, which really didn’t take into account that the horse is a sentient being with its own thoughts, intelligence and a need to express itself in the partnership with us.

I personally believe that some form of natural horsemanship should be the foundation of every single riding academy in the world, big or small, and that these principles be well established before any discipline is introduced.

I get shocked to my core every time I come across riders that don’t really know what natural horsemanship is and don’t know why they should use it!

My face is like ????

There are so many benefits that people are missing out on by not trying to learn what natural horsemanship is about and not making it a priority for their training and relationship foundation.

Here are some of the benefits and these are just the very basics:

Understand the basic body language of your horse, know which body signs to look for and how to mimic them to create a deeper bond, plus trust and respect that lasts.
Learn how to use pressure/pressure release training techniques to teach your horse anything on the face of the planet including trailer loading.
Establish safety and patience behavior with your horse to avoid accidents and injury to yourself and the horse.
Develop great manners for arena and trail riding plus ground handling for all ages of horses.
Teach your horse how to “give” to pressure making him light on the halter and light on the bit and easy to control.

These are just the basics. Ask me any training or handling question and natural horsemanship can give you a solution that will help you solve almost any issue pertaining to behavior and general training.

So many riders struggle with such basic things that natural horsemanship has had all the answers for, for eons. I first started training Natural Horsemanship over 25 years ago, so it’s not a new thing.

Ray Hunt (considered one of the “founding fathers” of todays natural horsemanship) started giving clinics in the 1970’s where his focus was the horse-human relationship and how to work together with the horse in a partnership.

Hunt has previously said,”I was working in the mind of a lot of people who didnt want to believe the horse had a mind. Get a bigger bit. Get a bigger stick. That was their approach.”

Sadly, in many cases I believe the latter to still be true. We don’t consider the horse and his own ability to think and feel in the process. We don’t really listen enough.

Riding is a one way relationship where we do our thing and the horse is just along for our benefit.

I think it’s so important to include the horse as an active thinking participant and ensure that he understands that there are both rewards, a fun growth process and benefits from being our partner.

Once the horse reaches partnership status where he is safe to be around, focused on us and well behaved on the ground and in the saddle, it’s important not to get stuck on training patterns that don’t fit the mindset of such a horse at this level anymore.

When riders learn Natural Horsemanship they have a tendency to do a lot of groundwork where they send the horse away and bring it back over and over again. The Join Up was first coined by Monty Roberts and has helped a great deal to teach horses to respect personal space of the person handling them and not behave dangerously in close proximity.

However, continuing to perform such exercises creates frustration in the horse. Negative reinforcement such as pressure/pressure release doesn’t include positive reward at the end unless you consciously add that to the equation.

We use pressure, body language, energy and tools to drive them away, and when we go passive we take the pressure away and the horse interprets that is a sweet spot that is more comfortable than experiencing the pressure of being sent away. But it’s still not the same as a reward or something positive.

In other words, the horse didn’t come back to you for any relationship based reason.

Which means that in actuality the dream of having a horse come to you because they love you is not being fulfilled through this natural horsemanship method of sending the horse away and then bringing them back. Not without including positive reward in the process.

I think we put on pink glasses and wow ourselves a little too much with the ability to call the horse to us.

After observing really talented dog trainers I noticed a huge difference between most horse training and dog training. The dogs looked so eager to please and beyond excited and happy to do their job. They were fully locked on to their human with a happy smile on their faces no matter how hard the work.

Very rarely did I experience this form of enthusiasm from a horse in training even with the best of trainers. I realized that one main component that was missing from horse training was Positive Reinforcement, also called rewards either in the sense of treats or fun for the horse.

Horse training in most scenarios is accomplished through negative reinforcement entirely. The aids are ALL negative reinforcement.

For those that don’t know, negative reinforcement is not the same as punishment.

Negative reinforcement means that a stimulus is removed (-) when the desired behavior is accomplished. Whereas positive reinforcement (+) means that a stimulus is added when the positive behavior is accomplished.

Example:

We want the horse to go forward so we squeeze with the legs (stimulus), when the horse goes we stop squeezing. This is negative reinforcement.
We want the horse to go forward, once it does we reward the horse with a treat (stimulus). This is positive reinforcement.

In my opinion, unless you want to train horses the way one would train wild animals, which takes a very long time using positive rewards and target training only, the most successful training is when we combine negative reinforcement with a bridge tool for increasing timing and understanding, followed by a positive reward that the horse enjoys.

Now we have a full vocabulary to communicate our exact wants very clearly to the horse and build his enjoyment of the process at the same time.

The dog never gets sent away though, unless it’s to do a trick because sending it away would break the friendship bond. We need to be careful not to continue sending our horses away once they are with us; they should stay with us and we need to treat the horses as more equal partners in the training process to give them a voice and listen to their wisdom.

Lastly, we want to make training enjoyable.

It doesn’t mean that we don’t use negative reinforcement anymore, it just means that they deserve to be rewarded for their efforts, just like the dogs. Then they might actually come to love the process as well as loving us.

Ride with Lightness

Celie xo

Listen to your horse…:

The pros and cons of Natural Horsemanship

I personally believe that some form of natural horsemanship should be the foundation of every single riding academy in the world, big or small, and that these principles be well established before any discipline is introduced.

I get shocked to my core every time I come across riders that don’t really know what natural horsemanship is and don’t know why they should use it!

My face is like ????

There are so many benefits that people are missing out on by not trying to learn what natural horsemanship is about and not making it a priority for their training and relationship foundation.

Here are some of the benefits and these are just the very basics:

Understand the basic body language of your horse, know which body signs to look for and how to mimic them to create a deeper bond, plus trust and respect that lasts.

Learn how to use pressure/pressure release training techniques to teach your horse anything on the face of the planet including trailer loading.

Establish safety and patience behavior with your horse to avoid accidents and injury to yourself and the horse.

Develop great manners for arena and trail riding plus ground handling for all ages of horses.

Teach your horse how to “give” to pressure making him light on the halter and light on the bit and easy to control.

These are just the basics. Ask me any training or handling question and natural horsemanship can give you a solution that will help you solve almost any issue pertaining to behavior and general training.

So many riders struggle with such basic things that natural horsemanship has had all the answers for, for eons. I first started training Natural Horsemanship over 25 years ago, so it’s not a new thing.

Ray Hunt (considered one of the “founding fathers” of todays natural horsemanship) started giving clinics in the 1970’s where his focus was the horse-human relationship and how to work together with the horse in a partnership.

Hunt has previously said,”I was working in the mind of a lot of people who didnt want to believe the horse had a mind. Get a bigger bit. Get a bigger stick. That was their approach.”

Sadly, in many cases I believe the latter to still be true. We don’t consider the horse and his own ability to think and feel in the process. We don’t really listen enough.

Riding is a one way relationship where we do our thing and the horse is just along for our benefit.

I think it’s so important to include the horse as an active thinking participant and ensure that he understands that there are both rewards, a fun growth process and benefits from being our partner.

Once the horse reaches partnership status where he is safe to be around, focused on us and well behaved on the ground and in the saddle, it’s important not to get stuck on training patterns that don’t fit the mindset of such a horse at this level anymore.

However, continuing to perform such exercises creates frustration in the horse. Negative reinforcement such as pressure/pressure release doesn’t include positive reward at the end unless you consciously add that to the equation.

In other words, the horse didn’t come back to you for any relationship based reason.

Which means that in actuality the dream of having a horse come to you because they love you is not being fulfilled through this natural horsemanship method of sending the horse away and then bringing them back. Not without including positive reward in the process.

I think we put on pink glasses and wow ourselves a little too much with the ability to call the horse to us.

Very rarely did I experience this form of enthusiasm from a horse in training even with the best of trainers. I realized that one main component that was missing from horse training was Positive Reinforcement, also called rewards either in the sense of treats or fun for the horse.

Horse training in most scenarios is accomplished through negative reinforcement entirely. The aids are ALL negative reinforcement.

For those that don’t know, negative reinforcement is not the same as punishment.

Negative reinforcement means that a stimulus is removed (-) when the desired behavior is accomplished. Whereas positive reinforcement (+) means that a stimulus is added when the positive behavior is accomplished.

Example:

We want the horse to go forward so we squeeze with the legs (stimulus), when the horse goes we stop squeezing. This is negative reinforcement.

We want the horse to go forward, once it does we reward the horse with a treat (stimulus). This is positive reinforcement.

Now we have a full vocabulary to communicate our exact wants very clearly to the horse and build his enjoyment of the process at the same time.

Lastly, we want to make training enjoyable.

It doesn’t mean that we don’t use negative reinforcement anymore, it just means that they deserve to be rewarded for their efforts, just like the dogs. Then they might actually come to love the process as well as loving us.

Ride with Lightness

Celie xo

Listen to your horse…:

The pros and cons of Natural Horsemanship

I personally believe that some form of natural horsemanship should be the foundation of every single riding academy in the world, big or small, and that these principles be well established before any discipline is introduced.

I get shocked to my core every time I come across riders that don’t really know what natural horsemanship is and don’t know why they should use it!

My face is like ????

There are so many benefits that people are missing out on by not trying to learn what natural horsemanship is about and not making it a priority for their training and relationship foundation.

Here are some of the benefits and these are just the very basics:

Understand the basic body language of your horse, know which body signs to look for and how to mimic them to create a deeper bond, plus trust and respect that lasts.

Learn how to use pressure/pressure release training techniques to teach your horse anything on the face of the planet including trailer loading.

Establish safety and patience behavior with your horse to avoid accidents and injury to yourself and the horse.

Develop great manners for arena and trail riding plus ground handling for all ages of horses.

Teach your horse how to “give” to pressure making him light on the halter and light on the bit and easy to control.

These are just the basics. Ask me any training or handling question and natural horsemanship can give you a solution that will help you solve almost any issue pertaining to behavior and general training.

So many riders struggle with such basic things that natural horsemanship has had all the answers for, for eons. I first started training Natural Horsemanship over 25 years ago, so it’s not a new thing.

Ray Hunt (considered one of the “founding fathers” of todays natural horsemanship) started giving clinics in the 1970’s where his focus was the horse-human relationship and how to work together with the horse in a partnership.

Hunt has previously said,”I was working in the mind of a lot of people who didnt want to believe the horse had a mind. Get a bigger bit. Get a bigger stick. That was their approach.”

Sadly, in many cases I believe the latter to still be true. We don’t consider the horse and his own ability to think and feel in the process. We don’t really listen enough.

Riding is a one way relationship where we do our thing and the horse is just along for our benefit.

I think it’s so important to include the horse as an active thinking participant and ensure that he understands that there are both rewards, a fun growth process and benefits from being our partner.

Once the horse reaches partnership status where he is safe to be around, focused on us and well behaved on the ground and in the saddle, it’s important not to get stuck on training patterns that don’t fit the mindset of such a horse at this level anymore.

However, continuing to perform such exercises creates frustration in the horse. Negative reinforcement such as pressure/pressure release doesn’t include positive reward at the end unless you consciously add that to the equation.

In other words, the horse didn’t come back to you for any relationship based reason.

Which means that in actuality the dream of having a horse come to you because they love you is not being fulfilled through this natural horsemanship method of sending the horse away and then bringing them back. Not without including positive reward in the process.

I think we put on pink glasses and wow ourselves a little too much with the ability to call the horse to us.

Very rarely did I experience this form of enthusiasm from a horse in training even with the best of trainers. I realized that one main component that was missing from horse training was Positive Reinforcement, also called rewards either in the sense of treats or fun for the horse.

Horse training in most scenarios is accomplished through negative reinforcement entirely. The aids are ALL negative reinforcement.

For those that don’t know, negative reinforcement is not the same as punishment.

Negative reinforcement means that a stimulus is removed (-) when the desired behavior is accomplished. Whereas positive reinforcement (+) means that a stimulus is added when the positive behavior is accomplished.

Example:

We want the horse to go forward so we squeeze with the legs (stimulus), when the horse goes we stop squeezing. This is negative reinforcement.

We want the horse to go forward, once it does we reward the horse with a treat (stimulus). This is positive reinforcement.

Now we have a full vocabulary to communicate our exact wants very clearly to the horse and build his enjoyment of the process at the same time.

Lastly, we want to make training enjoyable.It doesn’t mean that we don’t use negative reinforcement anymore, it just means that they deserve to be rewarded for their efforts, just like the dogs. Then they might actually come to love the process as well as loving us.

Ride with Lightness

Celie xo

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Lastly, we want to make training enjoyable.

It doesn’t mean that we don’t use negative reinforcement anymore, it just means that they deserve to be rewarded for their efforts, just like the dogs. Then they might actually come to love the process as well as loving us.